Photographing Beer – tutorial

I’ve often won­dered how they got those very attrac­tive pic­tures of the beers in Michael Jack­son’s 500 Great Beers book, and I’ve also been increas­ing­ly frus­trat­ed at how bad my own pho­tos are. They tend to look like this:

So I spent a few hours trawl­ing the web for tuto­ri­als on how to pho­to­graph food – this was a great one – and then tried to use some of the same tech­niques to pho­to­graph a nice pint of beer using my very basic dig­i­tal cam­era. Here’s the result:

I’ll tell you how I did it after the jump, if you’re inter­est­ed.

First­ly, I set up a very prim­i­tive white room in the light­est place I could find (the patio) using a large piece of white car­tridge paper and some blu-tack. Then I dug out the tri­pod and attached the cam­era, lin­ing it up nice and square on the “set”.

I cleaned a nice glass *very* thor­ough­ly, dried it, and pol­ished it with a lens clean­ing cloth.

I chose a beer I had two bot­tles of – Sum­mer Light­ning – and put one (with cap) on the table. Then I care­ful­ly poured as near a per­fect pint as I could. With­out too much delay, I placed it next to the unopened bot­tle and start­ed snap­ping away. I took about 15 pho­tos, hop­ing that one would turn out OK. I did­n’t use a flash – this puts big white spots on the bot­tle, and just looks weird. This is the un-tin­kered with pho­to:

I then adjust­ed the lev­els of white (Lay­er > Colours > Lev­els). Auto did quite a good job, but I man­u­al­ly set the paper back­ground to pure white (see this tuto­r­i­al for more on GIM­P’s lev­els con­trols).

Then, to fur­ther boost the image, and bring out the colours, I dupli­cat­ed the lay­er and set the top copy to “over­lay”.

That looks pret­ty good, and if you don’t like fid­dling about, you could leave it there. But I spent 10 min­utes care­ful­ly paint­ing out the grey in the back­ground, using a mix­ture of “mag­ic wand” selec­tions and care­ful work.

Final­ly, I played with the per­spec­tive fea­ture (Tools > Trans­form > Per­spec­tive) to straight­en the image up a bit.

I’m quite pleased with the results. Next time, I’ll add more light using reflec­tors – the bot­tle is a bit dark. I don’t know if I’ll do this *every* time I pho­to­graph a beer, but it real­ly did­n’t take too long, and the fin­ished prod­uct looks very appetis­ing. I’m drink­ing it now!

Great post. Usu­al­ly I can’t take the time to do a set­up like this, so my beer pic­tures end up being tak­en on the kitchen table! The results of the effort (or lack there­of) are quite clear when com­pared to what one can get with a lit­tle more effort. Thanks!

Telling the sto­ry of the rise and fall of Ger­man lager beer in Vic­to­ri­an and Edwar­dian Lon­don, Gam­bri­nus Waltz is avail­able for Kin­dle at Ama­zon UK | Ama­zon US (It’s “excel­lent” says Mar­tyn Cor­nell.)

Email Newsletter

Subscribe

* indicates required

Email Address *

Email Format

html

text

GDPR stuff

Please confirm you're happy for us to email you once a month, and very occasionally in between if we've got big news.

Email

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.